About the Author

Robert Kanigel is Professor of Science Writing and Director of the
Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT and the author of
Apprentice to Genius and The Man Who Knew Infinity. His articles,
essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine,
The New York Times Book Review, Wilson Quarterly, and Psychology
Today.

Reviews

In 1995, the Safelite Glass Corporation moved from hourly to
piece-rate pay for its workers and realized a productivity increase
of 20 percent per worker. After over 100 years, the work of
Frederick Winslow Taylor, a management expert who emphasized such
an approach to paying workers, still permeates the American work
force. Kanigel (Apprentice to Genius, Johns Hopkins Univ., 1993)
brings his winning writing style to this treatment of the enigmatic
Taylor‘often called the "father of scientific management"‘whom
Peter Drucker has said warrants a place alongside Darwin and Freud
in the making of the modern world. Kanigel deftly shies away from a
psychologically interpretive approach, drawing the reader right
into the heart of life in late-19th-century America, the age of
steam and steel (Taylor died in 1915). This rewarding and
beautifully written work is a shoo-in as a best business book and
will likely stand as the definitive work on Taylor. Essential.‘Dale
F. Farris, Groves, Tex.

An expansive and illuminating biography of both the man and the
gritty industrial world he inhabited.

-The New York Times

Who has "probably had a greater effect on the private and public
lives of the men and women of the 20th century than any other
single individual?" Few people nowadays would answer, "Frederick
Winslow Taylor" (1856-1915), the first "efficiency expert." But
Kanigel (The Man Who Knew Infinity) thinks that this claim may not
be an overstatement. Taylor, who came from a wealthy Philadelphia
family, turned down Harvard and went to work in a foundry, then as
an apprentice in a steel mill's machine shop, where he became a
foreman by the time he was 24 (and won the U.S. Open doubles tennis
championship the next year). Taylor later came to romanticize his
years as a mill worker and referred to them often when charged with
being antilabor, but it was as a "gang boss" that, armed with his
ever-present stopwatch, he began what he considered his scientific
"time and motion" studies of how long a worker took to do each step
of a specific job‘and how long the best workers should take. He
also managed to earn a degree in engineering from the Stevens
Institute and went on to increase the efficiency of machines (as
well as men). In the late 1890s, Taylor became a private consulting
engineer, spreading his gospel of efficiency and eventually making
a name‘and his fortune‘in high-speed steel manufacture. The
so-called Taylor System became internationally known, and in 1912
he even had to defend it before a congressional committee formed to
determine whether working people should be subjected to the rule of
a clock. Kanigel's admiration for his subject is tempered with
realistic skepticism. A most satisfying examination of a singular
American life. (May)

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